Just when we’re feeling cocky—superior and svelte,fate dishes out an uppercut, or one below the belt.Its fickleness is onerous. Its lessons often hard.Some end up with a loving cup and others with a shard.

So if misfortune catches you and holds you in its grasp,
for sure, good fortune harbors another in its clasp.
Rejoicing in their happiness may bring your pain’s surcease,
and looking at a larger view may bring you some release.

Some men are accustomed to eating all the pie.They see no good in sharing. They vie and vie and vieto horde the opportunities. It’s their sign of success.They profit on our labors, grow rich on our duress.

It brings a sort of balance, this giving and this taking.
It teaches us that fortune is not just of our making.
There may not be enough good luck to insist that they share.
Label him a “socialist”If anyone should dare.

Where is the one who’ll stop them? Who will come to show the way?What warrior or what holy man will lead us in the fray?Those who’ve usurped religion seem to have lost the point.They don’t champion the underdog. It’s rich men they anoint.

Everything is power and perhaps it always was.For eons we’ve forgotten this, probably becausethe photos of these greedy men reaching for the stars,cruising in their massive yachts and their racing cars,

look so pretty on the page. The minute that we see them,instead of censuring the greed, we simply want to be them.They stage their wars and make their gains and young men die to aid it.And instead of ruing war, we honor those who made it.

Serving your own needs or colluding with the Russiansmay bring Comminatory actions or other repercussions,for though you may be pardoned for malfeasance of your diction,we find we can’t forgive you for your constant words of fiction.

The way you won your office and your acts of derelictiontoward the country you have wronged may lead to your conviction.What sentence might such huge acts of questionable reasoncarry, let alone the sentence for your acts of treason?

You meet such accusations with rhetoric and a shrugwhile cronies in high office choose to sweep them ‘neath the rug.What do I recommend should they bring charges and convict you?Alas, that will not happen. It’s your judges who first picked you!

Will they carve his effigy on a golden coinand use it for ill purposes, our country to purloin?Will they pare back Utopia, and in their selfish carvingleave us all in danger? Leave the masses starving?When there’s no way left to judge them, when justice has been bought,will we all reach out too late for what we’ll wish we soughtmuch earlier, when there was a chance we could impeachthe ones who took Utopia farther from our reach?

Solace from this angst-filled world can best be found at home.It wraps around me snuggly under my protective dome.Prioritizing calm and peace, I have a little chatwith a dog or bird or two, or maybe with a cat.

I lie snug in my hammock and survey the too-long grassof my private little meadow where no evil comes to passshort of combat between possums and dogs too poorly trainedto entertain these welcome guests in manners more restrained.

Their battles are, alas, short lived. The dogs always the winners.As in the world, the bounty here goes to the biggest sinners.The possum’s only infraction? It’s not a dog or catand its physical resemblance is too close to a rat.

And so the world injects itself into my little nest,insisting the familiar is what we accept best.These battles happen when I’m gone or when I’m fast asleep,too lost to this too-conscious world, lost in a world more deep.

As things are on the outside, I fear they’re also here.My world is not a perfect world, but simply a small mirrorto what is happening all around. It is without a doubtthose who have most everything keeping others out!

A fabulist can take the truth and spin it, change it, plan it,but then it is no longer truth, for truth is carved in granite.The real truth is indelible. Permanent. Etched in stone.Don’t mess with it and call it truth. You must leave truth alone.It can’t accommodate a stretch. It’s fierce in resolution.It’s not right to bend it simply to find a solution.

Truth is truth and fabrication is another matter,so do not conjure up a tale and claim it’s not the latter.Though presidents and kings and poets scratching in their dormermight for their single purposes stray away from the former,there must be someone willing to call out their acts as ruthless,for there’s no folly greater than to be led by the truthless.